Ten years ago, an issue of the journal L'Homme et la Société was entitled “La Mode des identités.” Most of the articles were about cultural identity, but the basic thrust of the work was “a critique of the ‘fashion’ of identity calling into question the validity of a notion as striking as it is uncertain.” Recently, a special issue of the journal Sciences Humaines, entitled “Identité et identités,” dealt with personal, familial, social, professional identities and only spoke of cultural identity marginally and in a roundabout way. Finally, in a manual of Sociologie politique published by the Presses Universitaires de France, the author takes to task the notion of ethnicity inherent to cultural identity and pushes the critique of the ethnic group to the point of negating its objective existence. Must we think then that the notion of cultural identity is henceforth obsolete, that it has lost all pertinence?

A citizen of Early Renaissance Florence that stepped out into the streets and entered the spaces of his civic world joined a concert of creative formal behaviors in which he was at once an actor and a spectator. His problem here was to interpret the complex web of overlapping, conflicting and simultaneous meanings he would have read in the actions and images by which the community directed him and represented itself, and find his own place and set his standing. On most occasions he would probably have elected for a state of suspension, a floating of multiple possibilities he was loath to precipitate in too stable a form: in ambiguity the citizen of Florence developed a richness of signification, and found a refuge.

One of the characteristics of this ending century might very well be the resurgence of ethnic, nationalist, and fundamentalist movements, a group of manifestations conveniently designated by S. Huntington in the expression “the clash of civilizations.” Although in the West we live, since the end of the nineteenth century, in the paradigm of class struggle - even despite the fact that World War I fighters had proven that they accepted to “die for their country” - the 1990s seem to toll this model's bell in favor of a hardening of identity demands.

The cultures here in question are those of mathematics and of physics that I shall interpret with the goal of exploring different modes of creativity. As case studies I will consider two scientists who were exemplars of these cultures, the mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) and the physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The modes of creativity that I will compare and contrast are their notions of aesthetics and intuition. In order to accomplish this we begin by studying their introspections.

In the eighteenth century a large scale emigration of the most enterprising strata of mainly mercantile Greeks from their homelands in Asia Minor, Greece and the Balkans’ area, then under Ottoman rule, resulted in the creation of Greek merchant communities in the most important commercial and financial centers of the Mediterranean and Western Europe.

In May 1885, the Apache chief Geronimo, along with three other chiefs and a large band of adherents, absconded from their reservation in Arizona and fled to the mountains of New Mexico. The reservation life that had been imposed upon Indians by the United States government was a life that endeavored to mold them into good citizens; they attended school and church, wore European style clothes, farmed rather than hunted, and gave up many Indian traditions. It was a life Geronimo and his followers were unwilling to endure, and after some years of uneasy equilibrium, the chief led a revolt that turned into the so-called ‘Apache War.’ Geronimo held out for over a year, and it was not until the summer of 1886 that the war ended, and the chief surrendered. Eighteen years later, in 1904, the old Apache appeared at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the great World's Fair held in St. Louis, one of the grandest of the many such expositions staged in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Here, he earned himself some money by charging fairgoers to have their photograph taken with him. There proved to be no shortage of whites eager to have a souvenir image of themselves posed with him; and others even bought the buttons off his coat as more tangible mementos of the old warrior.

The word “identity,” like too many abstract words, has become a repetitive slogan in contemporary usage, sometimes even a resolute exemption from feeling and thinking. Identity is sacred; it is evident; we can only be for it.

We use this little abstract word none too seriously. We rush to build ideological camps on it. However, it conceals abysses that the greatest minds since Plato have sought to explore. We can read in the Timaeus, with respect to being and by opposition to becoming : “It is a solitary and unique circle, but because of its excellence capable of living alone with itself, without needing anyone else, and with respect to relations and friends, it is self-sufficient.”